Google hired writers from Pixar and The Onion to make Assistant more personable

Google wants its Assistant to be more than just an order-taking
robot — so it hired some clever writers from outside the company
to help make it happen.

A new story from the Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims
details the advancements of different artificial intelligence
devices like Amazon Echo and Google's rival product Home, and how
they're comforting for those who live alone thanks to how
personable the AI's have become.

For Google, that friendly personality is thanks to a team of
writers from Pixar and The Onion who helped make the Assistant —
which powers Google's Home device — sound more like a human and
less like a robot, according to the Journal. Google's eventual
goal is to help users build an emotional connection with the
Assistant, the Journal reports.

Google unveiled its Assistant-enabled Home device
last week, a direct competitor to other AI-powered hardware
devices like Amazon's Echo. The Assistant itself is similar to
Alexa, which powers the Echo: It has voice-recognition software,
natural language recognition, and it gets smarter over time.

You can ask the Assistant to tell you a joke, give you the
weather or set a timer, but you can also ask it to do things like
remember your favorite sports team or the city you live in. Much
like other AI — like Alexa or Apple's Siri — the Assistant can be
equal parts sweet and sassy, which is what helps it seem more
relatable and more human. The Assistant lives inside Google Home,
but it's also enabled in Google's new messaging app, Allo and its new Pixel smartphone.